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Spinning more bad news to pretend it answers skeptics. When 400 “equals” zero

Believers really do have trouble with numbers. Today 400 is apparently a lot like zero.

Since when was 400 years a gap that anyone called “close”? Especially when we are talking about a molecular effect that works in microseconds (or hey, even less).

Newspapers today are full of the spin that an Antarctic survey by Pedro et al, that found CO2 only lagged temperature by a mere tiny 400 years ‘… “addressed the argument of “climate sceptics” that CO2 increases did not lead to temperature rises because the temperature rise must come first.’ [The Australian]. Didn’t the editor notice that a lag of 400 years is still a lag? Did the journalist (Rosanne Hunt) not realize that even if the lag was measured in hours it still means temperature drives carbon dioxide, and not the other way around? This is nonsense on stilts. The Australian only published 6 lines, and one of them is barking.

The “lag” might be small on this scale, but it’s long compared to a taxpayers lifespan. Graph from the Australian Antarctic Division

The Australian Government (Antarctic Division) says it “closes the gap” and “Their findings suggest that feedbacks in the climate system – in which warming is linked to natural carbon dioxide increase, driving further warming – may operate faster than previously thought.”

But wait, if we only have to wait 400 years for this feedback to kick in, it won’t be disastrous in 2020, it will be 2345 before it starts (that’s the post WWII coal fired boom in emissions, plus 400). I just can’t see the electorate getting too worked up about it.

Synchronous? Since when was 4 centuries “near-synchronous”?

Watch the language – they are so sloppy with it.

“The ice cores reveal a near-synchronous temperature and carbon dioxide increase. If there was a lag at all then it was likely no more than 400 years,” says Joel Pedro from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC, in Hobart, who led the study.

For alarmists, numbers are not important, it’s all in the “words”. Eric Steig can’t emphasize how important this is.

Eric Steig, an American ice core expert based at the University of Washington who examined Pedro’s PhD thesis, said almost all previous work had provided uncertainties on the time lag between temperature and carbon dioxide in the order of many hundreds to even thousands of years. “I cannot emphasize enough how important this result is,” he said. “The authors collapse these values to something so short that it has major implications for our understanding of the carbon cycle and climate change.”

But wait a minute, which climate scientists thought it was “important” ten years ago when researchers realized that temperatures definitively rose first? Where were the headlines between 1999 – 2003 as paper after paper repeatedly showed that there was no chance CO2 rose before temperature. Until then climate scientists had been happy to let journalists assume that CO2 rises led temperature rises, and that this was important evidence for the theory of man-made climate disaster. (And even after the lag was well known among scientists, how many alarmist scientists protested when Al Gore implied it was still “evidence” in his 2005 movie? Would that be “none”? All we know for sure about CO2 feedbacks in ice cores is that climate scientists are not concerned about accurate reporting.)

Quite likely the positive feedback from temperature-driven-rises-in-CO2 could have some effect, but I’ve discussed before that no one can calculate or find it in the ice cores. Whatever effect there is, is so small, it is beyond statistical interpretation, and no one has published a paper calculating climate sensitivity with ice core data since the better resolution came out in the late 1990′s.

“Just as the steady increase in CO2 helped to melt the ice caps and warm the earth out of the ice age, the rapid increase now in CO2 is also driving up temperatures, only at a much faster rate,” he said.

Sune Olander Rasmussen…explains that one of the theories is that when Antarctica warms up, there will be stronger winds over the Southern Ocean and the winds pump more water up from the deep bottom layers in the ocean where there is a high content of CO2 from all of the small organisms that die and fall down to the sea floor and rot. When strong winds blow over the Southern Ocean, the ocean circulation brings more of the CO2-rich bottom water up to the surface and a portion of this CO2 is released into the atmosphere. This process links temperature and CO2 together and the new results suggest that the linking is closer and happens faster than previously believed.

I gave up The Australian when the digital pay wall came in. Don’t miss it. Moved our PO Box to the local shopping center so still have an excuse for a walk each day.
If I want to read shit from near illiterate left wing dickheads I can do that for free in lots of places on the web.

Since when did ‘facts’ matter to them. Few journalists understand this science of CO2, so they make it up or pretend they know after conferring with The Climate Change Department (Antarctic Division). Then it’s just spin.

Alarmists really are too funny. They lament the “pseudoscience” of skeptics while simultaneously providing conclusions so imprecise and ass-backwards as to be laughable. That anyone can say this and keep a straight face is mind-blowing. Perhaps John Brookes or some of the other pom-pom girls for the faithful can explain how 400 years lag is really a “driver” rather than an effect. So basically the more precise they are getting at defining the lag, the more it confirms that CO2 rise is definitely a consequence of temperature and not a cause. Why then can’t they just state the bleeding obvious- QED.

By way of demonstration, the pain one feels after being slapped in the face with the blood trickling from the corner of the mouth, does not cause one to be slapped in the first place! If any of the alarmists would like to conduct an experiment to confirm this through a series of discrete trials, I’m happy to oblige. Perhaps that would be the only way to convince them. I’ll be gentle, I promise.

Well, well, well will they keep producing bullshit studies until they finally get what they so deperately need (co2 leads temp).

By the way i would like to ask a question, a question i have asked many many times but have never received an answer to not even an attempt, *if 10,000 years ago the co2 lagged the temp by 800 400 odd years and since dawn of man temp now lags co2, what is the time period of this lag?

For example: If i eject a ton of CO2 on January 1 2013 when will i see a rise in temp associated with this ejection?

Don’t be so quick to adjust the apparent lag from 800 to 400 years. Look at the piecewise linear trendlines and assume that time differences at the transition at respective intersections should differ between temperature and CO2 by the same amount. The best-fit lines with that constraint suggest a difference closer to 800 than to 400 years, particularly if you exclude some anomalous Siple Dome data about the BP12,000 mark.

I read the original reports and like any good analysis where there were no exact measurements possible a margin of error was included that without digging up the originals had a range (from memory) of something like 300-800 years which places the “400″ within the error bar range and as such this is not even ‘news.’

Well I am confused does this mean that the temperature we have today is the result of the CO2 concentration we had 400 years ago or the CO2 concentration we will have in 400 years time.
That leads to an interesting question how does the earth know what the CO2 concentration will be in 400 years time so it can adjust todays temperature.

.Asimov .. decided to practice with a spoof article (including charts, graphs, tables, and citations of fake articles in nonexistent journals) describing experiments on a compound, thiotimoline, that was so soluble that it dissolved in water up to 1.12 seconds before the water was added

.

. He finally offered it to… the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, …[which] … accepted it for publication, agreeing to Asimov’s request that it appear under a pseudonym in deference to Asimov’s concern that he might alienate potential doctoral examiners at Columbia University if he were revealed as the author.

He need have no such concerns today. Indeed the skeptic must wonder is Climate Science not just a spoof, inspired by such goings on perhaps.

Coming events cast their shadows before them. Some initial effects indicating the nature of an event may be felt before it takes place; saying recorded from the early 19th century.

I can imagine the following conversation between two Neanderthal scientists some 15 000 years ago.
“I say Og, have you noticed that the snows of the Sierra Nevada are melting sooner each year.
Yes Gru, that is because of the increase in CO2 that will occur in 400 years time.”

Wow, the ignorance displayed here is enormous. Hard to know where to start. Milankovitch cycles have driven the overall tempo of glacial-interglacial cycles over the past several million years, with ocean warming occuring first from increased insolation leading to outgassing of CO2 and initiating a positive feedback loop, which is ultimately dampened by rock weathering and the removal of CO2 just as the Milankovitch cycles switch back to less insolation. A lag of centuries between initial temperature increases and CO2 is just about exactly the time required for outgassing and other biological feedbacks related to CO2 to really kick in.

Wow, the ignorance displayed here is enormous. Hard to know where to start.

Well Gates, why don’t you just enlighten us ignoramuses by starting at wherever you please. The beginning is fine but feel free to choose a start point to your liking. We’re waiting. (I got a couple of days off so am happy to engage)

Milankovitch cycles have driven the overall tempo of glacial-interglacial cycles over the past several million years, with ocean warming occuring first from increased insolation

Yes, that’s what they say. But you know what Gates, I’ve searched high and low but still can’t find a definitive paper that puts some meat on the bone of these Milankovitch cycles.
Numbers and time frames is what I’m looking for. What is the increase/decrease in solar insolation due to these (many) cycles? How long do they operate? How much do they increase/decrease temperatures? Do they affect the tropical regions the same as the polar regions?

outgassing of CO2 and initiating a positive feedback loop, which is ultimately dampened by rock weathering and the removal of CO2 just as the Milankovitch cycles switch back to less insolation.

Wow, that’s convenient and quite considerate of the rock weatherings to stop a possible runaway.
Do you have any evidence for…
A-) CO2 initiating a positive feedback
B-) The value of this feedback
C-) Details of the rock weathering process (time line, amount of CO2 removed etc.)
B-) Milankovitch cycles (which ones) switching back to less insolation.

A lag of centuries between initial temperature increases and CO2 is just about exactly the time required for outgassing and other biological feedbacks related to CO2 to really kick in.

Got any evidence for the time frame of these biological events? What are they, where do they take place?
Numbers please Gates, numbers.

No credible evidence either in this research or elsewhere to support the positive CO2 feedback orthodoxy and certainly none to support rock (limestone) weathering as an interglacial switch-off mechanism.
In fact CO2 levels during the current ice age were most uncooperative to the needs of the warming activists, who would have the gullible believe that the “evil” gas CO2 causes everything from warts to ingrown toenails.
As for Milankovitch and interglacials there does appear to be a cyclic correlation, but in my opinion the full explanation is not yet clear.

We first have to acknoledge we do not really understand why the Pleistocene Ice Age began 2.6 million years ago – perhaps it was the Panama Isthmus dramatically changing the ocean currents, or the effects of the flow basalt eruptions in Iceland, which have mostly occurred over the past 2.6 million years.

So, if we do not understand the cause of the current ice age, we have an even more imperfect understanding of why we have short (10-20,000 years)interglacial periods every 100-150 thousand years. Subtle long term changes in the Earth’s orbit seems the most likely reason at present. However, we should also not forget that all stars are “variable” in that the amount of energy they emit is not constant and our Sun is no exception – alarmists typically treat this self-evident fact as high heresy.

So, the Earth’s orbit changes (or the Sun’s energy output increases by a very modest amount) and our planet slowly warms up and circa 400 years later there is a positive reaction from the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Alarmists can always be relied on to go to great lengths to pour scorn on the reality that carbon dioxide levels react to changes in temperature, and not vice versa. Alarmists argue that the oceans warmed first (the “how?” of this is usually either very hazy or uses obtuse reasoning) and then the ocean degasses carbon dioxide which then causes a feedback adding to global atmospheric temperature.

There are a number of very obvious problems with this, the most important being the most likely sequence of events: The Earth warms (for argument’s sake, let’s say this was due to a subtle change in its orbit around the Sun) up, evaporation increases, therefore rainfall increases, glaciers retreat and melt. The amount of plant and animal life on the planet and in the oceans soar, resulting in a huge surge of carbon dioxide (and methane) being released into the atmosphere (previously dormant carbon in the biosphere is reactivated by both plants and animals). The oceans will probably release some carbon dioxide as temperature rises, but the oceans are very undersaturated in carbon dioxide.

Temperature changes first, carbon dioxide levels follow. This is absolutely logical, so why is this concept so hated by the followers of the CAGW cult?

Keep in mind that this person “R. Gates” is actually using a pseudonym, unwilling to use their real name. S/he used to troll WUWT quite regularly. Sorry you good chaps (and chap – ettes) are being subjected to this acrimony now.

Wow! The ignorance displayed by “R. Gates” is enormous, isn’t it? Milankovitch cycles are but one factor in global climate, which is a non-linear dynamic system (that means that climate changes all of the time) with complexities we have yet to uncover.

Please explain how this hypothetical “positive feedback” gets shut down; we know that it must, because all “positive feedback” systems are divergent. Once you must claim some “unknown” dampening effect, Occam’s Razor will be employed.

Maybe you should plan on spending some time running my oft-requested cross-correlation between Veizer’s paleotemperature and Berner & Kothavala’s GEOCARB III; I’ve asked Tristan, Ross James, John Brookes, MattB ad infinitum ad nauseum but they won’t, or they won’t post their results.

Lead researcher Joel Pedro said these findings provided reasons for the end of the ice age and the role carbon dioxide may have played in this process through further warming.
Mr Pedro said the research also addressed the argument of “climate sceptics” that CO2 increases did not lead to temperature rises because the temperature rise must come first.

So what are the reasons that Joel Pedro claims to be responsible for the end of the “ice age”? An increase in ocean CO2 outgassing commencing 400 years after ocean temperature started rising somehow just doesn’t cut it.

How many alarmist scientists protested when Al Gore implied it [a specious non-causal CO2 / temperature correlation] was still “evidence” in his 2005 movie? Would that be “none”?

Yes, that would be none, as they were not happy to see the very foundation of their theory removed. But, I think thanks to the leftist media, the theory still stands… without its foundation!
And still, perhaps 98% of the public doesn’t even know that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is not a causal one. That’s why it would be very helpful to share and link to this video, a succinct 3 minute excerpt from The Great Global Warming Swindle that shows Al Gore repeating the key ipcc deception on CO2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&desc=GGWarmingSwindle_CO2Lag

Wow,what don’t they understand?Follows,comes after,not before or at the same time,lagging,following.Geez,how thick do they have to be?Opposite to preceding,not happening at the same time or before.Words fail me.

Ah,Mr Gates,I remember an encounter with you when you didn’t answer my question.All I wanted was a simple answer.Was Dr Viner right or wrong stating snow is a thing of the past.You never did answer my question.Feel free to give me an answer now.All I got from you was waffling.Did you take your medication as I suggested?Sorry it never worked.

Consider the SL claim of Williams, Gore’s stupendous statements on the temp of earth’s interior, the original 1998 hockeystick that wasn’t rape-rape of the data. Now the huge lag that isn’t a lag at all.

Shouldn’t we be asking the Khampuchea-1975 questions: What won’t they believe, and how far won’t they go?

Commentor Cookster brought up the news items about the Pedro paper in a previous thread here.

In one of my responses to him I pointed out another paper by Pedro called “The last deglaciation: timing the bipolar seesaw.” Found HERE
You’ll note that this paper uses the VERY SAME ice cores (plus Vostok and EDC which is interesting in itself) used in the previous paper along with additional cores from Greenland.
What it finds is that when Antarctica warms, the Arctic cools and when the Arctic warms, Antarctica cools.

This finding places ice core researchers in a dilemma, namely, if there is an oscillating swing between the Antarctica and the Arctic, which of the warmings does CO2 outgassing follow, the North or the South?
Other unsolved mysteries are, for example, is there a ‘degassing’ when the Antarctic cools? Does the outgassing of a warming Arctic match or exceed the degassing of a cooling Antarctic and vice versa?

Questions questions, so many questions. However there is one question that has had a consistent answer to date. i.e.
Which comes first, temperature or CO2? The answer to date has ALWAYS been temperature.

KK, No I am not a scientist but I do understand cause (heating from natural variation) & effect (release of CO2 dissolved in seawater). I’m also well aware of the positive feedbacks built into GCMs but as yet unsupported by empirical evidence. Anyhow, I’m glad I brought this up and Jo has chosen to do a piece. I feel somewhat vindicated and thank Baa for persevering with me.

I’m hearing you, Tony. She also said something about the people now having a prime minister they can trust to tell the truth. Worse, I think she believed it! Not sure, I ended up on the floor on that one, having fallen out of my seat.

Methinks the warmist claims are getting increasingly desperate.
Foolishly, they do not realize that every hysterical, outlandish claim just adds damage to their cause.
If, as I suspect, that the ALP gets ~20% primary vote at the next election, then we can expect the CAGW cheerleading to be a significant part of the decimation.

Its the normal knee jerk stuff i suppose. Site is really becoming a bit formulaic and not nearly as funny as it has been. Still, worth checking out on occasion for those odd moments of jump the shark hilarity.

I thought the story was that man emitted CO2 and that caused the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to rise which prevented energy from escaping back into space which caused the earths temperature to rise.How many times have we been told look how much the CO2 is rising at Mauna Loa and look how much the temperature has risen.Yet this would tend to indicate that the CO2 concentration today is the result of temperature movements 400 years ago.So what causes temperature to rise in the first place.

You lot and the rest of the World must understand there is no CO2-AGW nor can there ever be.

Also the positive feedback claimed by the IPCC via the water cycle is an artefact of the way the models work – 5 times real IR absorption by the lower atmosphere offset by exaggerated cloud albedo means evaporation of sunlit ocean is vastly exaggerated.

There can be no CO2-AGW because by ~200 ppmV it’s in self-absorption mode. A subtle bit of physics means it turns off IR emission in that band. Other GHGs do the same. The restriction of emission sites means higher impedance to IR emission, higher temperature, the real GHE

All this reminds me of a track (Now you see it) on the “Barking at the Moon” Album by Ozzy Osbourne.
I draw the analogy with Climate science and the constantly moving goal posts (settled science- in a pig’s eye).
“Now you see it, now you don’t
Now you see it, now you don’t
Now you see it, now you don’t
Give me central heating, hope that I can pay the bill
Making me forget my fear of hell,
yeah Must be luck in odd numbers,
now you face me upside down
I’m so far up…”
I’m afraid to come back down.”

I had a similar problem when I tried to boil water beofre turning on the flame.

I’m just not buying into this new ’cause always comes before effect’ thing. I don’t believe it, not one bit. Its a right wing conspiracy, that’s what it is, perpetrated by the tobacco and big oil lobby.

Easily fixed: you need a big parabolic mirror to focus back radiation in the dark.

It’s twice the radiative flux you get from sunlight you know, and if you put your hand out flat, palm down on a still cloudless night, you can feel the heat exactly the same as 4 feet away from a 2 kW kitchen boiler…..

You don’t look across and match the points horizontaly. Time is vertical. So you look at a moment in time and ask what is the CO2 doing at that moment in time.

I can see that as temperature increases, the CO2 concentration has a reaction to it. It’s not an equal reaction. As the temperature rises from -8 to -6 the CO2 rises from 190 to 205. Temperature -6 to -4 CO2 rises 205 to 210 (about), Temperature -4 to -2 CO2 210 to 240.

As temperature decreases over time, the CO2 has a very slow reaction to it. There is obviously a background variation signal wich is stronger than the decline in temperature, but it goes down eventualy.

Money is a funny thing. A salary is what you can report as your anual income. And that any speeking enguagements are not part of your salary (wink). Nor are any benifets of your 10 board memberships, Christmass bonuses, KPI bonuses, ect. No no no… Not part of my salary.

Nowhere in this paper did I find the words, soluble, solubility, outgas or outgassing.
The physical concept of the solubilty of CO2 in water being a factor of temperature
and pressure appears to have been ignored. It’s not hard to work out why.

Peter Miller
July 25, 2012 at 6:40 pm ·
“We first have to acknowledge we do not really understand why the Pleistocene Ice Age began 2.6 million years ago –..”

If the Svenmark cosmic ray/cloud theory is correct then there is possible explanation for the onset of Ice-Age conditions
~ 3 million years ago.

The Solar System entered a large low density cavity in the local inter-stellar medium roughly 3 million years ago. This
huge bubble of reduced interstellar gas density was created by a combination of stellar winds and supernova explosions
from young massive (O and B) stars over the last few hundred million years in this part of the galaxy.

Once the Solar System was in this cavity it began to be bathed in a much higher flux of cosmic rays being emitted by clusters
of O and B stars that surround the cavity. The significant increase in cosmic ray flux increased the amount of cloud in the
Earth’s troposphere, leading to the onset of an extended cooling period.

The Solar system is currently about half way across this huge empty bubble in the inter-stellar medium, and so my forecast
is that for the next 3 million years we will continue to have ice age conditions. After this, the Solar system will re-enter
the wall of the interstellar cavity and the cosmic ray flux hitting the Earth and we should enter a period of general warming.

P.S. The solar system is approaching a small whiff of interstellar cloud near the center of this interstellar cavity. Hence,
we might have a short period of mildly warmer temperatures here on Earth over the next hundred thousand years or so
if the gas in this cloud partially shields us from the stream of cosmic rays.

The variation in atmospheric CO2 shown in the ice cores is usually between 200 and 290 ppm.
At the IPCC’s best estimate of climate sensitivity, around 3C per doubling, this could only account for around a 1.6 degree shift in global mean temperatures.

The actual shifts in temperature we see when overlaid with the ice core data is around 6 to 7 degrees so it doesn’t explain around 75% of the warming.

Further I think the IPCC’s climate sensitivity estimate is still far too high.

“When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2 but by changes in the Earth’s orbit. The warming causes the oceans to release CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet. So CO2 causes warming AND rising temperature causes CO2 rise. Overall, about 90% of the global warming occurs after the CO2 increase.”
(http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm)

Is it faulty? Yes. It’s speculation — there is no evidence to back it up.

Their argument ignores the point I made, that there is no statistical test or published paper that can find acceleration in temperatures after the CO2 starts to rise. Perhaps CO2 has an effect, if so, we need to believe that temperatures would not have continued on their rise at about the same rate as before, but would have flattened. Apparently CO2 exactly counters the flattening (which is due to unspecified forces) and the timing is coincidentally so close that we can’t separate the feedback of CO2 from the original rise in temperatures caused by orbits, and the line has the appearance of being one roughly linear rise.

Un Skeptical Science would also find it hard to explain why those raised CO2 levels (which caused 90% of the rise according to them) were overcome by another mystery force that caused temperatures to fall 8 degrees over the next 15,000 years while CO2 stayed constant and high.

The simpler explanation is that temperature causes most of the CO2 rise (Henry’s Law) and that CO2 has only a minimal “positive feedback” effect. The effect is too minimal to be measured or calculated, and it does not stop global cooling from occurring while it’s high. This fits the graph.